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THE WORLD’S MOODS 


UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME 


HOW THE WORLD BEGAN 

The Story of the Beginning of Life on Earth 

HOW THE WORLD GREW UP 

The Story of Man 

HOW THE WORLD IS RULED 

The Story of Government 

THE WORLD OF ANIMALS 

The Story of Animals 

THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD 

The Story of Botany 

HOW THE WORLD IS CHANGING 

The Story of Geology 

THIS PHYSICAL WORLD 

The Story of Physics 

WHAT MAKES UP THE WORLD 

The Story of Chemistry 

OTHER WORLDS THAN THIS 

The Story of Astronomy 


Thomas S. Rockwell Company 
Publishers 
CHICAGO 








II 


Publishers Note 


This book presents in popular form the 
present state of science. It has been reviewed 
by a specialist in this field of knowledge. An 
excerpt from his review follows: 


'7 am very pleasantly impressed by 
this Story of the Weather. The 
author tells simply and accurately 
her interesting tale of the world’s 
moods” 


Signed: Griffith Taylor 

Professor of Geography 
The University of Chicago 






Weather men ma\e maps of the whole country to 
show the direction of the winds 

















































THE WORLD’S MOODS 


By 

Maryanna Heile 

II 


Drawings by 

Jerome Graham 



THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1930 



I 


Copyright, 1930, by 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

Chicago 


Printed in United Strict of America 



©CIA 


28712 



CONTENTS 


I The Air Around the World 

What is air? What use is the air except to 
breathe? How far up does the air go? Why 
is the s\y blue? Why does sunlight loo\ 
yellow? What ma\es the colors in the sun¬ 
set? Where do the rainbows come from? 

II Night and Day 

Why does it get dar\ at night? Why doesnt 
it get dar\ all at once? What ma\es moon¬ 
light? What ma\es the days longer in the 
summer than in winter? 

III Heat and Cold 

Why is it hot in the summer time? Why is 
it cold in the winter? Why are some summer 
days cold? 

IV Water in the Air 

What maizes water dry up? Where does the 
rain come from? Do all clouds make rain? 
Do clouds have different names? Where do 
fogs come from? Can fog be driven away? 
What ma\cs the dew? What is frost? Why 
does frost ma\e pictures on the window 
pane? What good is frost? Why is the 
snow white? What good is snow? What 
ma\es the hail? What is sleet? How do 
people s\ate on ice? 


57 


V The Wind 

Where does the wind come from? Where 
does the wind go? What are the u trade 
winds’? How many winds are there? 
Where do hurricanes stride? What \ind of 
wind blows in North America? What winds 
do other countries have? What makes cy¬ 
clones? What is a tornado? 

VI Thunder and Lightning 77 

What is lightning? What maizes the light¬ 
ning flash? What are lightning rods for? 
What makes the thunder growl? What are 
the northern lights? 

VII Balloons and Airplanes 89 

Why does a kite stay up in the air? Why 
does a balloon go up? How does an air¬ 
plane stay up? How does the airman guide 
the plane? What is a glider? When was 
the first airplane built? How does the air¬ 
man k now where to go? 

VIII The Weather Man 99 

How does the thermometer tell how hot it 
is? What does the word thermometer mean? 
What is a barometer? What makes the 
weather? How does the weather man tell 
about the weather? Who is the weather 
man? Can we do anything about the 
weather? What good is the weather? 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

WEATHER MAPS SHOW ALL THE WINDS Frontispiece 
A RADIO CATCHES CERTAIN WAVES 13 

A RAINBOW IN A SPRINKLER 16 

A SUNSET HAS LOVELY COLORS 17 

VOLCANOES THROW UP DUST CLOUDS 18 

NOKOMIS EXPLAINED TO HIAWATHA 21 

APOLLO WITH THE SUN CHARIOT 25 

THE GODDESS OF THE MOON 27 

SNOW MAKES A FAIRYLAND 36 

CIRRUS CLOUDS ARE CURLY 41 

CUMULUS CLOUDS ARE LIKE SOAPSUDS 42 

STRATUS CLOUDS ARE IN LAYERS 42 

THE BOATS STAY IN THE HARBOR 43 

FROST PICTURES ON THE WINDOW 48 

SNOWFLAKES ALWAYS HAVE SIX POINTS 51 

SAILING VESSELS TRAVEL SLOWLY 62 

THE FIRST STEAMBOAT HAD A PADDLE WHEEL 63 
A BOAT IN THE CALMS 64 

A TROPICAL HURRICANE 67 

A CAMEL IN A SAND STORM 71 

A TORNADO IS DANGEROUS 75 

FRANKLIN FLEW A KITE 78 

LIGHTNING FLASHES ARE CROOKED 79 

LIGHTNING RODS PROTECT BARNS 81 

THOR THREW HIS HAMMER 83 

HUDSON AND HIS MEN PLAY NINEPINS 84 

A GAY CHINESE KITE 90 

THE GREAT GERMAN ZEPPELIN 92 

THE PROPELLER IS IN FRONT 93 

A BIRD STEERS LIKE AN AIRPLANE 94 

A THERMOMETER MEASURES HEAT 100 

A BAROMETER MEASURES PRESSURE 101 

INSTRUMENTS HELP THE WEATHER MAN 102 

RINGS AROUND THE SUN 105 





































































































































































































- 





















. 





















Chapter I 


THE AIR AROUND THE WORLD 

AIR is a colorless ocean of gas that covers the 
•L earth. It extends, though very thin, at 
least two hundred miles above the earth. The 
gas that makes up air is really two gases, oxygen 
and nitrogen. Oxygen is a gas that makes 
things burn, and it is so active that it would 
burn up people if they breathed it in by itself. 
But it is mixed with nitrogen, which is a gas 
that keeps the oxygen from doing us harm. 

These gases are both clear, so that if no smoke 
or dust or steam were mixed with the air people 
could see for miles and miles. But near the 
ground there is always a lot of dirt and water 
mixed with the air, especially in the big cities. 
Everybody breathes in a great deal of this dusty, 
smoky air. If they breathe through their 
noses the little strainers up in their noses take 


What is air? 


11 


12 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What use is 
the air except 
to breathe? 


the dirt out, but if they breathe through their 
mouths the dirt goes right into their lungs and 
is very bad for them. These little strainers in 
their noses make the air warm in cold weather, 
so that it doesn’t hurt the lungs. 

When the air keeps still nobody pays any 
attention to it, but when it moves around 
making the trees toss about and the dust blow 
in people’s eyes, and the window shades flap, 
then it is wind, and everybody talks about it. 
When the wind gets very strong, so that it 
makes tornadoes and hurricanes, and blizzards, 
then it does a great deal of damage. The air 
weighs a great many pounds on every square 
inch of the earth, but while people keep air in 
their lungs they don’t feel the weight on the 
outside. 

Everybody in the world keeps on breathing 
air—about sixteen breaths every minute—as 
long as they are alive. But the air is good for 
other things. Waves travel on it just the same 
way that waves go on water in a lake or river. 
When a stone is dropped into water it makes 


THE AIR AROUND THE WORLD 


*3 


ripples that get wider and wider and finally die 
out some distance away from the stone. The 
air has sound waves just like that. When a 
sound is made in the air, waves go away from 
the sound and die out some distance away. 
Near to the noise the waves are big and the 
sound is loud; farther away the waves are small 
and the sound is faint; far away it cannot be 
heard at all. 

The air can carry several kinds of waves at 
the same time. The sun is very hot, so hot that 
although it is millions of miles away it can send 
heat to the earth. The heat travels through 
space on heat waves. When the earth gets 
warm it sends out heat waves, too, so that on a 
hot summer day people get heat from two direc¬ 
tions, up from the earth and down from the 
sun. Smell waves travel on the air as the others 
do, but for shorter distances. 

Not long ago a wise man in Italy named Mr. 
Marconi discovered that he could send out an¬ 
other kind of waves by using electricity. Those 
waves were a kind of sound waves. They 



certain waves 













THE WORLD’S MOODS 


How far up 
docs the air go? 


M 

could be caught by a little machine that is 
called a radio. Now everyone can hear music 
and speaking coming through the air. 

The clouds float around in the air until they 
are ready to come down in rain. Balloons and 
airplanes travel through the air. Trees and 
grass and plants of all kinds get the gas called 
nitrogen from the ground and make it into food 
for us to eat. The corn and wheat that people 
eat have nitrogen in them that the plant got out 
of the earth and stored up in the grains. 

Not long ago an army aviator went up in a 
balloon to see how far he could go above the 
earth. He got up eight miles. Up there the 
air was so thin that he could not breathe and 
was just able to get his balloon started down 
before he fainted. It was so cold up there that 
he froze his face. Little balloons without any¬ 
body in them have gone up as far as twenty-five 
miles above the earth. 

The higher up a person goes above the earth, 
the thinner the air gets, so that after a while 
people cannot breathe and must come down. 


THE AIR AROUND THE WORLD 


i5 


It gets colder and colder the higher up it is until 
it is more than one hundred degrees below zero. 
The sun’s rays seem to go through the upper air 
without making it any warmer. The air is in 
layers one on top of the other, each one thinner 
than the last. The one that is around the earth 
is the thickest. 

The sky isn’t really blue at all; it just looks 
blue. Aviators who have gone up five or six 
miles into the sky say that it is black. There 
is no color there at all; it just looks blue to us. 

The reason for the blue color that everyone 
sees is this: The sun’s rays are made up of a 
mixture of all the colors there are: violet, blue, 
green, yellow, orange, red. When these colors 
are all mixed together people’s eyes see white. 
When there is no sun at night and no colors 
at all, people see black. It means that there 
are no light waves around. Black isn’t really 
a color; it is just no color at all. 

But these colors in the sun’s rays are each one 
a little wave in the ether. The red waves are 
the longest, the orange ones are next longest, 


Why is the 
sf(y blue? 


i6 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



A rainbow in a sprinkler 


then the yellow and green and blue ones, and 
the violet waves are the shortest of all. 

When a wave in the lake strikes the shore it 
breaks all up into bits of water and foam. 
When a ray of sunlight strikes something 
thicker than air, like glass or water, all the little 
color waves break up, so that instead of white 
light there are colors. Sometimes the sun 
shining through a goldfish bowl will break up 
into colors; sometimes a piece of three-cornered 
glass will do it; sometimes the sun shining 
through the spray from a grass sprinkler will 
make little rainbows. 

The air is never clean. It is always full of 
smoke and grains of dust and tiny drops of 
water. When the sun shines through all those 
little particles they turn aside the shortest waves. 
The shortest waves are the blue ones. When so 
many of them have been taken out of the sun¬ 
shine and turned toward us the sky looks blue 
to persons living on the ground. 

If the day is very clear, perhaps after a rain 
has washed most of the dust out of the sky, the 



THE AIR AROUND THE WORLD 


l 7 


sunlight will look white. But on a day when 
there is much dust and dirt in the air the sun¬ 
light slanting across the fields and houses near 
evening looks as yellow as gold. That is 
because the bits of dirt in the air have taken out 
a great many of the blue waves out of the sun¬ 
light. When the blue waves are taken out the 
yellow ones show up more. That is why the 
sunlight looks yellow. It looks yellower in the 
late afternoon because it has farther to go when 
the sun is over in the west, and so has to go 
through more dust, so that more of the blue 
waves are taken out. 

Sometimes when the sun is ready to go down, 
so many of the blue waves have been taken out 
of the sunlight that only the orange, red, green, 
and violet waves, are left. Then these colors 
show in the western sky and people see a fine 
sunset. Sometimes conditions are so that there 
is very little color to be seen in the sunset. Then 
we know the light is not being interfered with. 

If there are clouds near the sun when it sets 
the red rays go up and strike the clouds and are 


Why does 
sunlight 
loo\ yellow? 


What maizes 
the colors in 
the sunset? 



A sunset has lovely 
colors 


i8 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


reflected back in pink and lavender. Fog and 
smoke and dust will make the sunsets even 
more beautiful, for there are then more particles 
in the air to break up the white light of the sun. 

When great volcanos have erupted, throwing 
into the air a great lot of fine dust, the sunsets 



Volcanoes throw up clouds of dust from inside the 
earth to ma\e trouble in the air 


are very beautiful. Some great eruptions of 
volcanos have made so much dust that some of 
it floated all over the world. A hundred and 
fifty years ago a great volcano in Iceland opened 
and blew into the air much dust as fine as 



THE AIR AROUND THE WORLD 


*9 


powder. It was really rock ground up fine 
down in the volcano. For six months this dust 
made a thin smoke all over Europe, frighten¬ 
ing people everywhere. Since people didn’t 
know what caused it they thought that the end 
of the world was coming. 

The sun looked red through the dust, which 
scared them all the more. They gave away 
their farms and dug their graves and got all 
ready to die, but the dust settled down finally 
and the rains washed it away, and the people 
forgot how frightened they had been and went 
back to their work. 

When it rains and the sun is shining, a lovely 
half circle of colors comes in the sky just 
opposite the sun. That is a rainbow. It is 
always in the sky across from the sun; it comes 
only when the sun shines through the rain. 
Usually on the top of the bow is red, then yellow, 
then green, then blue, and on the bottom, violet. 
Sometimes the colors are in the opposite order 
and sometimes some of them are missing. 

The old Greek people have a story that the 


Where do 
the rainbows 
come from? 


20 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


rainbow was placed in the sky by Zeus, the king 
of the gods, as a pathway for Iris, who was the 
messenger of the gods, when she carried mes¬ 
sages to the other gods. They thought that the 
bow of colors reached from one side of Heaven 
to the other. In other stories the rainbow is 
the scarf of many colors that Iris wore about 
her shoulders. She ran so fast that the scarf 
was blown out across the sky. 

The Indians in America had a pretty story 
that the rainbow was made up of the souls of 
the dead flowers. In Longfellow’s poem, 
“Hiawatha,” the little Indian boy asked his 
grandmother what the rainbow was. 

“And the good Nozomis answered: 

’Tis the Heaven of flowers you see there; 

All the wild flowers of the forest, 

All the lilies of the prairie, 

When on earth they fade and perish t 
Blossom in that heaven above us ” 

But what really happens when the sun shines 
while it is raining is that the beams of sunlight 
passing through the millions of raindrops are 



Nozomis explained to Hiawatha what made the 
earth and s\y and the colors of the rainbow 


21 










22 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


broken up into the six colors. The water in 
the raindrops is thicker than the air. First it 
breaks off the red color waves of the sunlight, 
then the orange, then the yellow, then the green, 
then the blue, then the violet. 

If two showers come one right after the other, 
sometimes there are two rainbows, one below 
the other. People used to say that there was 
a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, and 
many people went out to look for it, but no one 
ever found it. 

Once a man had a field that he was too lazy 
to plow. One day a rainbow ended in this field. 
His neighbors told the lazy man that if he 
would dig in the ground he would find the pot 
of gold. So he went out and dug all over the 
field, but he did not find the gold. Since he 
had the field all plowed up he planted some 
wheat and grew a fine crop, which he sold for 
a great deal of money. The moral of the story 
is that work is better than gold. 




Chapter II 


NIGHT AND DAY 

ALL of the light on the earth comes from 
■L the sun. The sun stands still up in the 
sky, but the earth doesn’t stand still at all. It 
makes two different kinds of movements. 
First, it turns all the way around, like a top 
spinning, every day. Second, it makes a trip 
all the way around the sun once a year. That 
is, the earth turns itself, so that we go around 
in a little circle every day and night. It does 
that three hundred and sixty-five times in a year, 
but while it is turning in this little circle it 
makes one big circle around the sun. 

When the earth is making the little circle 
every day, one-half of the world is turned toward 
the sun and one-half of it away. When any 
part of the earth is turned away from the sun 
it is dark there and people say that it is night. 


Why does it 
get dar\ 
at night? 


23 


24 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


The half of the earth that is turned to the sun 
gets light, and they say that it is day. 

The first thing that people thought about was 
the sun. It gave them heat and light, and when 
it was dark they were afraid. The first people 
on the earth worshipped the sun as a god. They 
built temples to the sun and burned sacrifices 
on the altars to make him kind to them. 

The Indians had a story that a brave young 
warrior named Wabun brought the morning. 
He chased the dark away by shooting at it with 
silver arrows. They thought that it was the 
crimson paint on his cheeks that made the 
streaks of red in the eastern sky in the morning. 

The Greeks were for a time worshippers of 
the sun god, whom they called Apollo. He 
drove the chariot of the sun across the skies 
every day. Four strong horses were harnessed 
to the chariot. It was made of gold and silver, 
set all about with diamonds. When the horses 
were harnessed Dawn threw open the gates of 
the east and Apollo drove the chariot in which 
was the flaming sun, up a steep pathway to the 


NIGHT AND DAY 


25 


top of the sky and then down to the west, where 
Tethys, the goddess of the sea, was waiting for 
him. She carried Apollo and his sun chariot 



Apollo drove the chariot of the sun across the s\y 
between dawn and dar\ every day 


in a boat back to the east to be ready for the next 
day’s journey. 

In most countries there is a time after the 
sun goes down that people call twilight, or half 
light. This light gets dimmer and dimmer 
until, after half an hour or so, it is really dark. 

The reason that it does not get dark all at 
once when the sun goes down in the west is 
that the sun’s rays travel in waves. These 
waves do not always go in a straight line. 


Why doesn’t 
it get dar\ 
all at once? 


2 6 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What ma\es 
moonlight? 


Some of them come up over the curve of the 
earth in the west and make light even after the 
sun is gone. As the sun gets farther and 
farther down, fewer light waves can reach us 
over the edge of the world. Finally they do 
not come at all and it is really dark. 

It never gets entirely dark on the earth. 
There are always a few light waves getting 
around to the side that has no sun. The stars 
give a little bit of light. Some animals, like 
the owls and cats, can see in the dark. Their 
eyes are made to use the tiny bits of light that 
are on the earth, even after it seems very dark 
to people with common eyes. 

The moon travels around the earth in just 
the same way that the earth travels around the 
sun. The moon does not turn around like a 
top the way the earth does. It only shows one 
side of itself to the earth. 

There isn’t any air around the moon, and it 
is a cold land without any people or plants or 
animals. It is just rocks and mountains and 
deep valleys of stone. Because it hasn’t any 


NIGHT AND DAY 


V 


air, or trees or grass, the moon is like a big round 
looking glass that reflects the light of the sun. 
When the moon shines on the earth with a 
strong white light, it is just the light of the sun 
being reflected back from the moon onto the 
earth, in just the same way that a lamp is 
reflected in a mirror hanging on the wall. 

Moonlight is sometimes quite bright, but it 
is never warm. The light waves from the sun 
can strike the moon and come back to the earth, 
but the heat waves cannot. Some of the color 
waves that are in daylight are not in moonlight, 
so that colors like red, green and purple don’t 
show up very well under the moon. 

Artemis, the goddess of the moon, was the 
twin sister of Apollo. She was the goddess of 
the hunt, but she helped to protect the animals 
of the wood, especially the deer. Her brother 
took care of the day and the sun, but she was 
queen of the night and the moon. 

The moon goes around the earth once a 
month. Part of that time the shadow of the 
earth gets in between the sun and the moon, so 



moon 




28 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What ma\es 
the days longer 
in the summer 
than in winter? 


that only part of the moon shows. One reason 
that we know the earth is round is that the 
shadow of the earth on the moon is always 
round. Once every month for two or three 
days the shadow of the earth does not come near 
the moon and then people say that it is full. 
It gives much light then. 

The earth goes around every day just like a 
top spinning, but a top stands straight up while 
it whirls around. The earth turns a little bit, 
first toward the sun and then away from the 
sun. The north pole is up on top of the world. 
If the earth just went round and round the 
north pole would never have any light. All 
the light and heat would strike the center of the 
earth, down around South America. But the 
earth moves for six months so that the north 
pole is turned toward the sun for that time. 
Then it turns back again and for six months the 
people up near the north pole have a long night, 
while the people down near the south pole have 
a day that lasts six months. 

When the earth turns so that the north is 


NIGHT AND DAY 


2 9 


toward the sun we have longer days and shorter 
nights and we call it summer. When the south 
pole is turned toward the sun our part of the 
earth is farther away from it and the days are 
shorter and the nights longer, and we call it 
winter. The axis about which the earth turns 
always points to the Pole Star—called Polaris. 

Up in the Arctic the weather is so cold that 
nothing can grow for about nine months of the 
year. Most of the time the ground is all covered 
with snow and ice. No trees can grow there, 
so that the people have learned to build their 
houses out of blocks of ice. They make them 
round like half of a ball. If the roofs were flat 
the weight of the snow might cave them in. 

Inside of the house is a bench all around the 
wall where the family sit to work and use for 
a bed. In the center of the floor is a hole for the 
fire. Often the house is very smoky, but if it 
is warm the Eskimo does not care. To help 
keep out the cold, the door outside is at the end 
of a long passageway which is just high enough 
for a person to crawl through. The Eskimos 


30 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


use dogs to pull their sleds, because horses could 
not live in the cold. The dogs sleep in the 
passage at night. 

The Eskimos live on seal fat, which we call 
blubber. It has a fishy taste and is very oily 
and they eat it without cooking, but it keeps 
them warm through the long winter. They 
sometimes have reindeer meat. The reindeer 
live in very cold countries by eating the moss 
that is under the snow. 

Although there is no sun for six months in 
the far north, it is not very dark because the 
stars give some light and the Aurora Borealis 
that shines like a great rainbow in the northern 
sky all winter long makes pink and purple and 
blue lights on the snow. 








Chapter III 


HEAT AND COLD 

W HEN the earth turns toward the sun 
around the imaginary line called its axis, 
during our springtime and summer there is 
more heat here because we get the sun’s rays 
more nearly straight. They are hotter because 
they do not have quite so far to go and they do 
not lose so much heat as they come through the 
air. The sun is very hot at the equator, which 
is an imaginary line drawn exactly half way 
between the north and south pole. It is not 
so hot further away because the rays must travel 
in a slanting direction through the air to reach 
the earth and some of the heat is lost. 

On June twenty-first of each year the earth 
has turned so that the north pole is looking 
toward the sun. Then the days in the United 
States and Canada are about fifteen hours long. 


Why is it 
hot in the 
summer time? 


31 


32 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


On December twenty-first the north pole is 
turned as far away from the sun as possible, and 
on that day we see the sun for only about nine 
hours. 

During the long days the ground gets hot 
and does not cool off very much during the 
short nights. That helps to keep the earth 
warm in the summer time. Of course, while 
the people in North America are having sum¬ 
mer because the earth has turned on its axis 
toward the sun, the people in South America 
are having winter because their country is 
turned away from the sun. 

All the seasons of the year are caused by this 
turning of the earth. If the earth stood up 
straight all of the time and did not turn toward 
the sun and away from it, we would have just 
one kind of weather all the time. Since North 
America is a long way north of the equator, 
where the sun would be shining if the earth did 
not turn, we would have fairly cold weather, 
about the kind of weather that we have now in 
March and September. Not many of the trees 


HEAT AND COLD 


33 


and plants that we have would grow very well 
if it were that cold all the time. 

In December, January, and February, the 
earth is turned away from the sun in this part 
of the world. It is turned so far that up where 
the Eskimos live they do not see the sun at all. 
In the United States we get some of the sun’s 
rays, but they come to us so slantingly that they 
have lost much of their heat and do not give 
us very much. Then we have ice and snow 
and cold weather. The great amount of ice and 
snow in the north help to keep it cold there after 
we have spring, but often the summers in 
Alaska are warm and pleasant. 

The countries that are near the north pole 
and the south pole never do get very much heat 
from the sun even when they are turned toward 
it. They are too near the top and bottom of 
the earth and the rays of the sun strike them too 
slantingly. Up in Canada the summers are 
short and only a few kinds of grains that will 
grow and get ripe in three or four months can 
be raised. In the northern parts of Russia they 


Why is it cold in 
the winter time? 


34 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


have very short summers, too, and can only raise 
certain things. 

At the earth’s equator the sun shines very 
hot all the time and, where there is rain 
enough, the trees and other plants grow very 
large and tall. The people there do not have 
to worry much about clothes to wear because it 
is so hot, and they do not work very hard to 
grow things to eat because in the great heat 
plants grow very fast. They can often just go 
out and pick a dinner off a tree. Cocoanuts, 
bananas, breadfruit, and oranges, grow without 
any help from the people who eat them. It is 
so warm that they do not have to worry about 
houses either. 

As the summer goes on, the earth slowly 
turns back so that the equator is directly under 
the sun, and the weather gradually gets colder. 
We call that time fall. Then comes the cold 
winter. After the winter the earth turns again 
and we have warmer weather, or spring. Every 
year the same thing happens in the same way. 

The old Romans had a goddess that they 


HEAT AND COLD 


35 


called Ceres, who, they thought, made the sea¬ 
sons come and go. They thought that for six 
months she was mourning for her daughter who 
had been stolen away from her. During that 
time she was sad and did not let anything grow 
upon the earth. Then for six months her 
daughter came back to her and she was happy 
and made the trees bloom and the crops grow. 

The air around the earth is in motion all of 
the time. When it is warm it gets lighter and 
then it rises and cold air comes in to take its 
place. There are some high mountains where 
the sun never melts. The air from these moun¬ 
tains gets very cold and flows down on the 
plains, making them cold. 

Sometimes wind blowing over the ocean gets 
very cold before it blows on the land. Clouds 
get between the earth and the sun and keep 
the sun’s rays from striking it, so that the earth 
gets cold even in the summer time. Rain may 
fall and use up the heat that is near the ground 
to dry up the water. There are so many things 
that can happen to change the weather that it 


Why are some 
summer days 
cold? 


36 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


is seldom the same for more than a day at a 
time. We ought to be glad this is so, for people 
would soon become tired of the same weather 
day after day. 



The snow is cold, but it turns the country into 
a clean, white fairyland 






Chapter IV 


WATER IN THE AIR 

W HEN a kettle boils on the stove, steam 
comes from it. The steam looks white 
near the kettle, but a little way from the fire it 
disappears. When a pan of water is set on the 
radiator for a few days the water vanishes. 
When it rains the sidewalks are wet for a time, 
but before long they are all dry again. Where 
does the water go? 

The water evaporates. That is, it dries up. 
It turns into tiny drops like steam, so little that 
they cannot be seen, and they float off in the 
air. The air always has some of this mois¬ 
ture. Sometimes it is called vapor. Even if 
the land is very dry, there is water in the air, 
because the rivers and lakes and oceans give up 
some of their water to it. The moisture is 
carried by the winds even over deserts. 


What ma\cs 
water dry up? 


37 


3 « 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Where does the 
rain come from? 


When a tin can of cold water is taken into a 
warm room, drops of water gather on the out¬ 
side of it. Since the water could not climb out 
of the tin can it must be the vapor in the air 
settling there. If the tin can was in a desert 
place where there had been no rain for months 
the water drops would form on the outside just 
the same. It might be water evaporated from 
an ocean hundreds of miles away blown there 
by the winds. 

Heat makes the water on the earth dry up 
faster. When the sun is shining the rain is gone 
much quicker than on a cloudy day. The wind 
helps, too, because it blows away the tiny drops 
and lets others form where the water is lying. 

These tiny bits of water in the air are too 
small to see by themselves, but they get together 
around the grains of dust in the air; we say that 
they condense, which means to come closer. 
These tiny drops are not big enough to be rain; 
they are more like mist. 

The air they are in is near the earth and 
is warm. It rises up and spreads out. As it 


WATER IN THE AIR 


39 


spreads it gets cooler. When a quart of air 
spreads out into two quarts it gets colder because 
it has only heat for one quart to give to two 
quarts. As they get cooler the tiny droplets of 
moisture around the little grains of dust get 
together in one great mass and make a cloud. 

The cloud is heavier than the rest of the air 
and would sink to the ground if the warm air 
rising from the ground did not keep pushing it 
up. The winds blow it around. It gets bigger 
and bigger as more droplets join it. Then the 
warm air pushes it up so far that it gets cold. 

The cold makes more vapor condense on the 
little drops. They get so large and heavy that 
they cannot stay up in the air and so they fall 
down to the earth and the people on the earth 
put up their umbrellas because it is raining. 

The first drops are the largest because they have 
picked up some of the smaller drops on the 
long way down. 

Some clouds are not carried up by the warm o 0 all clouds 
air rising. They slowly sink down to the ma K e rain ? 
ground again. When they get near the ground 


4 o 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


the air is so warm that they change back into 
vapor again and go off into the air. A cloud 
may be formed in one part of the country and 
blown far away by the wind so that the rain 
does not fall from it until it is hundreds of miles 
away from the place it started. 

Often a great deal of rain falls on one side 
of a mountain range while almost none at all 
falls on the other side. The mountains may 
have too much rain on one slope and a desert 
on the other. The reason for this is that the 
wind blows from one direction. It brings the 
clouds to the mountains, but they cannot get 
over the tops without going high up in the air. 
As they go up they get cold and the drops of 
moisture go together until they are so heavy 
that they fall in rain before the cloud can get 
over the mountain. When the wind gets over 
to the other side it does not have any clouds; 
they have all turned into rain. 

That is what happens out in California along 
the Coast Range of mountains and in India 
along the Himalaya Mountains. 


WATER IN THE AIR 41 

Some countries have a rainy season and a dry 
season. All of the rain falls during a certain 
two or three or four months. The reason for 
that is that in those countries the wind blows 
for those months from a direction where there 
are clouds. They bring the clouds and the rain 
falls. Then the winds change to some other 
direction and no rain falls for many months. 

All clouds do not look alike. The men who 
foretell the weather know by looking at a cloud 
if it is a raincloud or not. Some clouds look 
white and feathery; others look grey because 
the sun is shining behind them. Storm clouds 
look black and purple. 

The clouds highest up in the air, sometimes 
eight or ten miles up are called the cirrus clouds. 
The word cirrus means curl. They look like 
great white curls of feather. The winds in the 
upper air bend and curl them about. They are 
long and slender and often are frozen clouds 
because the cold is so sharp up that high. 

On bright summer days there are many 
cumulus clouds. They are like piles of soap 


Do clouds 
have different 
names? 



Cirrus clouds are curly 


42 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



Cumulus clouds are 
li\e soapsuds 


Where do fogs 
come from? 



Stratus clouds are 
in layers 


suds, or woolly heaps. They are white and very 
pretty against the blue sky and the sunshine. 
They are often five miles up in the air and are 
carried about by the high winds. At the top 
of a mountain travelers can look down on the 
top of cumulus clouds that are resting along the 
slope. The cumulus clouds often get very large 
and on hot days cause thunder storms. 

The clouds lowest to the earth are called 
stratus clouds. The name means layer or 
sheet. When a great deal of air rises from the 
ground and gets cool without being moved 
about by winds, this kind of a cloud is formed. 

Fog is just air that is filled with water which 
lies close to the earth. It is oftenest seen over 
a lake or an ocean. When fog comes over the 
land it usually is called mist, but fog and mist 
are the same thing. 

Fogs are like clouds close to the ground. 
Water from the river or ocean, or just from the 
wet earth, goes into the air in tiny drops. These 
drops collect as the night gets cool, and if there 
is no wind to blow them away, they stay on top 










WATER IN THE AIR 


43 


of the water. A fog is not like a cloud in one 
way. The vapor in a cloud goes together and 
makes big drops which fall in rain when they 
get cold. A fog, for some reason, never does 
collect and make rain. 

If a wind comes along, it blows the fog or 
mist away. If the sun comes out hot the tiny 
drops that are big enough to see divide into 
vapor again and disappear. The fishermen 
along the seashore do not dare to go out on the 
water when there is a bad fog because they can¬ 
not see their way and they might get run into 
and wrecked. So they sit along the shore and 
hope that the sun will come out hot and “burn 
the fog up.” 

Up along the shores of Newfoundland where 
great fleets of boats go to fish every year there 
are very heavy fogs. When they come the men 
cannot fish and they stay in the boats and sound 
the fog horns every few seconds. Often the 
boats run into each other or into the icebergs 
that float around in the water. 

England is a small country entirely sur- 



The boats stay in 
harbor 






44 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Can fog be 
driven away? 


rounded by water, and there is much moisture 
in the air all the time. When a cool wind 
blows over the island it very often makes bad 
fogs that last for two or three days. They are 
so smoky that people cannot find their way 
around the streets. The lights do not do much 
good in such a fog, and many persons do not 
get to their homes until it goes away. 

For a long time men have been trying to find 
a way to get rid of fogs. They have discovered 
that the tiny drops of water in the fog have a 
certain kind of electricity in them. If the 
other kind of electricity is put in sand and the 
sand is dropped into the fog it will go away. 
But it is too expensive to put the electricity into 
the sand and to hire an airplane to go up and 
drop it into the fog. 

Fogs over the airports make it very hard for 
the aviators to land because they cannot see. 
Great ships do not dare come into a harbor when 
there is a fog. If some way could be found to 
drive it away without waiting for the wind and 
the sun to scatter it, much time and money could 


WATER IN THE AIR 


45 


be saved. Fog has some use, however. There 
are places in the world where it never rains, and 
yet plants and trees grow because the fogs bring 
them all the moisture that they need. 

For a long time people thought that dew fell 
from the sky during the night just like rain. 
But about one hundred years ago it was dis¬ 
covered that dew did not fall at all; it collected 
on the leaves and roofs out of the air. The air 
has some water vapor all the time. If this vapor 
strikes anything cold, it collects on the cold 
object, just as the water gathered on the outside 
of the water pitcher. 

When the sun has gone down at night the 
earth cools off very quickly. The leaves of 
trees and grass are thin and they lose their 
warmth in a very little while. When the mois¬ 
ture in the air is blown against the cool leaf by 
the little breezes near the ground it collects on 
them and if a person goes out to walk in the 
grass about two hours after the sun has gone 
down he will find that his feet are wet with the 
evening dew. 


What ma\es 
the dew? 


4 6 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


If the wind blows too hard the little drops of 
vapor are tossed about so fast that they cannot 
stop on the leaves, so that there is no dew on a 
windy night. If the sky is covered with clouds 
the dew will not form because the clouds act 
like a big blanket over the earth. They keep 
the heat from leaving the earth. The leaves 
keep their heat and the vapor in the air does 
not find a cold place to gather on. 

Sometimes there is dew on the under side of 
leaves of cabbages and grass blades that are near 
the ground, even if there is no dew on the tops. 
The moisture from the ground—there is always 
some water in the ground—rises when the earth 
cools at night and some of it strikes the cool 
under side of the plants that are close to the 
ground and makes dew there. So that dew 
doesn’t ever really fall, but it does sometimes 
rise up from the ground. 

In the morning the wind and sun dry up the 
dew again very quickly; That is, the drops of 
dew turn into vapor again in the air. The same 
vapor may gather again the next night on the 


WATER IN THE AIR 


47 


same plant if it is not blown away by the wind. 

Frost is dew that has frozen as it gathered. 
On cold nights the vapor collects just as it does 
for dew, but the things it gathers on are so cold 
that it freezes. In the morning people see a 
thin white coat over everything, as if there had 
been a little snow storm. 

The thick frost that gathers on the ground is 
sometimes called hoar-frost. It is the moisture 
that is rising from the ground that has frozen. 
Frosts kill many plants and leaves that they 
freeze on. If the weather man says that there 
will be a frost everyone tries to cover the flower 
beds to keep the frost from collecting on the 
plants. The men who have orchards in bloom 
in the spring when it gets cold enough to freeze 
the blossoms sometimes build fires between the 
trees to keep the air warm so that the frost will 
not come on them and kill the fruit. 

There is vapor in the air even inside of the 
house. In cold weather the air near the win¬ 
dows is colder than anywhere else because some 
of the cold from outside gets through the glass. 


What is frost? 


Why does frost 
ma^e pictures 
on the 

window panes? 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



Frost pictures on the 
window 


What good 
is frost? 


The moisture in the air near the window 
wants to collect, so it collects on the nearest cold 
object, which is the window pane. The little 
drops of vapor, when they freeze, try to make 
patterns with six corners, but other drops freeze 
on top of them and bits of dirt and grease on 
the glass get in the way. All that the vapor 
drops can do is to make pretty pictures of ferns 
and trees and flowers on the glass. 

Long ago there was no black dirt or sand on 
the earth. It was all hard rock. Nothing could 
grow because there was no place for the plants 
to put their roots. 

But the rains came and washed tiny pieces 
off the rocks. The winds blew and drove the 
grains of sand against them. The frosts froze 
the water in the cracks and split them; and after 
a long time dirt was made. Seeds were brought 
by the wind and washed down by the rivers 
and trees and grass grew in the piles of ground 
up rock. When they died they helped to make 
more soil. Rivers, winds, rains, and frosts, all 
help to make more dirt for plants to grow in. 









WATER IN THE AIR 


49 


The frost is still at work every winter break¬ 
ing up the clods in the fields and the stones 
along the rivers. In that way the frost pays the 
farmer for killing his crops too early in the fall 
sometimes, by making new earth for him. 

Snow is not frozen rain. It is frozen cloud. 
It comes from clouds that have been taken by 
the winds up two or three miles into the air 
where it is very cold. Here the little drops of 
vapor do not make rain drops because they are 
frozen before they can get together. The tiny 
vapor drops meet each other and as they freeze 
make a snowflake that has six points. When 
a snowflake lands on a black coat sleeve it often 
does not have all of its points because some of 
them have been broken off in coming down two 
miles through the air. They all start out from 
the cloud with six points. 

The snowflake is really very thin ice, and if 
we could look through it, we would find that it 
was clear like a piece of ice. It looks white 
because the light shines on it from so many 
sides that our eyes see nothing but the reflection 


Why is the 
snow white? 


50 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What good 
is snow? 


of the white light. Every snowflake has six 
sides, but no two flakes are ever alike. A man 
who has been studying snow for ten years has 
taken pictures of more than five thousand snow¬ 
flakes, and they are all different. 

The snow is light and is easily blown by the 
wind and piled up in drifts. When this hap¬ 
pens the roads are blocked and people cannot 
get to their work, children cannot get to school, 
street cars do not run, and everyone is very cross 
until the roads and streets are shoveled out 
again. Sometimes the snow comes from a cloud 
that is very high up in the sky where it is very 
cold and the flakes are small. If a strong wind 
comes while these tiny flakes are falling we have 
a blizzard. In the western states and in Canada 
these blizzards are so bad the air is filled with 
the little flakes until no one can see even two feet 
ahead. People who get caught in a blizzard 
often die because they cannot find their way to 
shelter. Men are afraid to go from the house to 
the barn to feed the cattle, for fear of getting 
lost. Often they build a covered passage to the 



Snowflakes freeze in shapes U\c fine white feathers, 
always with six points or six sides 

51 




52 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


barn to use in case of bad snow storms. Many 
times when one of these storms came up the 
children in the little country schoolhouses had 
to stay all night and sometimes for three of four 
days at the school until it stopped snowing, be¬ 
cause they could not get home. 

Hunters can follow the tracks of the animals 
in the snow. The Indians made snowshoes of 
small branches and deerskin. They looked like 
a tennis raquet, but with them on his feet an 
Indian could travel on the tops of the snowdrifts. 
In many places people use skis, long narrow 
strips of wood, one on each foot, to travel very 
swiftly over the snow. 

Snow is very beautiful when it is new and 
white. If a wind is blowing while it is falling 
it makes queer and lovely shapes around the 
trees and bushes. An American poet, Mr. 
Whittier, has written a poem about a bad snow 
storm that he saw when he was a boy. 

“Unwarmed by any sunset light 
The grey day darkened into night, 

A night made hoary with the swarm 


WATER IN THE AIR 


53 


And whirldance of the blinding storm, 

As, zigzag, wavering to and fro, 

Crossed and recrossed the winged snow: 

And ere the early bedtime came 

The white drifts piled the window frame, 

And through the glass the clothesline posts 
Looked like tall and sheeted ghosts!* 

Although the snow does so much damage it is 
useful as well. The roots of plants would be 
frozen during the cold winter if the snow did 
not cover them and keep some of the bitter cold 
out. When the snow melts in the spring the 
water makes the ground wet and helps the crops 
to start growing. It takes ten or twelve inches 
of snow to make one inch of water. 

Hail is rain that has frozen before it fell. It 
is made high up in the air where it is cold. One 
of the little water drops around a grain of dust 
freezes in the cold air and starts to fall. It is so 
cold that other drops of moisture gather on it 
as it goes through the cloud. Before it gets 
through the clouds a strong upward current of 
air strikes it and takes it back higher again. 
There it is frozen again and gathers some more 


What makes 
the hail? 


54 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What is sleet? 


water and snow around it. This may happen 
three or four times until the hail stone is so large 
that it falls. 

The hailstone is made up of a center of ice, 
then many layers of ice and snow frozen around 
it when it had gone through the clouds up and 
down. Hail always falls during a thunder 
storm and usually after a very hot day when 
there has been a great deal of warm air rising 
from the earth. The stones may be very small, 
or as big as marbles. Some people claim that 
they have seen them as big as baseballs. 

A bad hail storm may do a great deal of 
(damage. The stones are driven by a strong 
wind very often, which throws them through 
glass windows, beats down the crops in the 
fields, strips the leaves off the trees, and even 
kills small animals. There is no way that any¬ 
one knows to stop hail from falling on the earth. 

What most people call sleet is rain falling on 
a cold day so that it freezes as soon as it touches 
the ground. It freezes on the trees, on the tele¬ 
phone wires and on the sidewalks. It may keep 


WATER IN THE AIR 


55 


on raining and freezing until the ice is an inch 
thick. Then people must put sand and ashes 
on the walks to keep from slipping, and the 
great weight of the ice on the trees breaks off 
branches. The telephone wires break and the 
linemen must work hard to repair them. 

Real sleet is snow that has struck a warm 
layer of air and has partly melted before it 
reaches the ground, or it is tiny drops of vapor 
that have frozen and are falling without becom¬ 
ing snowflakes. 

When the first ice freezes on the lakes and 
ponds and rivers, people get out their skates 
and sharpen them ready to go skating. It is 
the best of all winter exercises. People do not 
go out of doors enough in the cold days. Skat¬ 
ing makes the ankles strong and keeps the rest 
of the body straight and healthy. 

Many people do not know that skates do not 
really slide on ice, but on water. When the 
sharp edge of the skate strikes the ice and slides 
along it, the scraping makes a little heat. The 
heat is enough to melt a tiny bit of the ice. 


How do people 
s\ate on ice? 


5$ 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


The skate slides along on this little sheet of 
water, just as if it were oil spread on the top 
of the ice. When the skate has gone on, the 
little film of water freezes again at once. 

It does not often get cold enough in England 
for ice to freeze sufficiently hard to skate on. 
The people there often go to Switzerland for 
the winter sports. It is cold enough there, high 
up in the mountains, so that they can skate and 
go on ski trips, and slide on the great toboggan 
slides. The sun is bright there, because it is high 
up and the air is clear. 




Chapter V 


THE WIND 


ALMOST as soon as men began to think 
J- about the sun they must have noticed the 
winds. They made up stories about the winds, 
as they did about everything else that they did 
not understand. The Indians said that Wabun, 
the warrior whose silver arrows drove away the 
night, was given the east wind by his father, 
who was king of the winds of heaven. Shaw- 
ondassee was given the south wind, Kabibon- 
okka, who lived in the land of ice and snow, was 
given the cruel north wind. Mudjekeewis, the 
father, kept the west wind himself. 

In the winter the north wind came and stayed 
in the wigwams of the Indians, but a brave man 
wrestled with him and drove him north again 
in the spring and the lazy south wind sent the 
birds and flowers north. 


Where does 
the wind 
come from? 


57 


5» 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


The Greeks had a story about the winds. 
They called the king of the winds Aeolus. He 
lived on an island in the ocean. The four winds 
he kept shut up in a cave on the island, and he 
only let them out when he wanted to, or when 
one of the gods wanted a wind. The west wind 
was a gentle and kind wind called Zephyrus. 
The north wind was called Boreas. He was 
rough and rude. 

We do not make up stories about the winds 
any more because men have found out what 
causes them. They are started blowing by the 
sun, which seems to be the force that starts al¬ 
most all the weather. 

Warm air does not weigh as much as cold 
air. When the air in one place gets warm it 
rises. Other air must take its place, so cool air 
moves in. Then other air has to take the place 
of the cool air, and so there is movement of air 
all over the land. 

When the cool air reaches the place where the 
sun warmed the first lot of air, it, too, will be 
warmed and it will go upward, while still other 


THE WIND 


59 


air will come to take its place. The air that goes 
up does not make any wind; it is the cool air 
coming in to take its place that we feel and call 
wind. When a window is opened at the top 
and on the bottom on a cold day the warm air 
goes out the top opening and cold air comes in 
at the bottom. Someone will say that the cold 
air coming in is a draught, but it is the same 
thing that a wind is, only it isn’t so big. 

If the earth were like a ball with the sun shin¬ 
ing on the equator every day, the winds would 
be always the same. The sun would warm the 
air in the middle of the earth; it would rise and 
half of it go toward the north and half to the 
south. Then cool air would come in to the 
center of the earth from both north and south. 
All the winds would be blowing toward the 
equator. In North America the winds would 
all be toward the south and in South America 
all the winds would be toward the north. 

But the earth does not stand still. It turns 
every day and that affects the winds. The 
mountains and the cold oceans and the lakes 


6o 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Where does 
the wind go? 


and deserts change the currents of air. Cold 
winds come down the mountain sides; warm 
air sweeps up; winds turn aside to go around or 
over mountains; everywhere the winds are 
twisted into different shapes and directions. 

No one can tell just where the wind goes 
to. When it blows over our part of the land it 
keeps on going in the same direction until it 
gets warm enough so that it rises into the sky. 
There it gets cold again and comes down to take 
the place of some other air that has gotten 
warm. Usually the wind blows from a cold 
place to a warm one, and from a place where 
the weight of the air on top of it is great to a 
place where the weight of the air on top is not 
heavy enough to stop it. 

Air does not seem to have any weight because 
people can not feel it on their hands and heads. 
It isn’t very heavy, but there is so much of it 
above the earth that it does weigh a great deal. 
Some men who have studied the air say that it 
goes two hundred miles above the earth. The 
air does weigh about fifteen pounds on every 


THE WIND 


61 


square inch of the surface of the earth, on every 
inch of the surface of every house and of every 
person’s body. The reason that this great 
weight doesn’t crush a house, because it amounts 
to many tons on even a small house, is that there 
is air inside the house. The air inside pushes 
out with just the same force that the air outside 
pushes down. There is a weight of one hun¬ 
dred and fifty pounds on a person’s hand as he 
holds it out. But there is a weight of one hun¬ 
dred and fifty pounds under it pressing up, so 
that the person does not feel any weight at all. 

It is this great weight of the air up above that 
makes the air on the earth move about in winds. 
Land gets cold and hot so easily that the winds 
on land change often. The mountains and 
rivers and lakes on the land change the direction 
of the winds. On the ocean the wind does not 
change very often because the ocean does not get 
hot and cold very fast. Water in great bodies 
like the ocean does not get warm very quickly 
in the summer, and there are no mountains in 
the ocean to turn the winds aside. The winds 


62 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What are the 
"trade winds”? 


on the ocean blow steadily from one direction 
for a long time. 

When the Pilgrims came to America three 
hundred years ago it took them almost three 



It too\ the wind several months to blow the Pilgrims* 
ship across the ocean 

months to come from England. A short time 
ago a ship crossed the ocean from England to 
America in four days. The reason that the 
Pilgrims came so slowly was that their ship was 
a sailing vessel that had to wait for the wind to 
drive them along. If the wind did not blow the 
ship had to stand and wait for another wind. 

When a man named Robert Fulton made the 
first boat in America that was driven by a steam 






THE WIND 


63 


engine and did not use sails everyone laughed 
at him. People were so used to using the winds 
and traveling in sail boats that they did not see 
how there could be any other kind. 



The first steamboat was pushed through the water 
by a paddle wheel on the side 


Now there are hardly any sail boats left on 
the water. The great steam boats are so much 
faster and safer because they do not have to wait 
for the wind. But three hundred years ago the 
sailors had to depend entirely on the winds. 
They learned that there was a place north of the 
equator where the winds always blew from the 
northeast. South of the equator they blew from 
the southeast. The men going out in ships to 




6 4 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



A boat in the calms 


trade with India or China learned to use these 
winds to blow them there and back. So they 
were called trade winds. 

The sailors hated to get directly on the cen¬ 
tral zone of the earth because there are fewer 
winds there than elsewhere. They call it the 
belt of calms. There is a reason for the trade 
winds and for the belt of calms. The sun shines 
hottest on the center of the earth where the 
imaginary line called the equator is. The land 
there gets very warm and the air gets warm and 
rises just as warm air always does anywhere. 
As it goes up half of it goes to the north and 
half to the south. It gets cooler and starts to 
come down. If the earth did not move it would 
make winds directly from the north and from 
the south blowing toward the equator, but the 
earth is turning all the time from the west to 
the east, so that the winds are turned and blow 
from the northeast and southeast. 

Because it is so very hot around the equator 
the winds get hot and rise before they reach it, 
and there is no wind there at all. A poet named 








THE WIND 


65 


Mr. Coleridge once wrote a poem about a ship 
that got into the belt of calms and could not 
move for a long time. 

Day after day, day after day, 

We stuc\, nor breath nor motion; 

As idle as a painted ship, 

Upon a painted ocean. 

In the poem a water sprite comes and takes the 
ship out of the place where there is no wind, or 
it would have stayed there forever. 

There is an old English nursery song about 
the wind that tells just about what everyone 
there thinks about all the different winds. 

When the wind is in the north 
The birds and beasts do not go forth. 

When the wind is in the east 
’Tis neither good for man nor beast. 

When the wind is in the south 
It blows the bait in the fishes mouth. 

When the wind is in the west 
Then the fishes bite the best. 


66 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


How many 
winds are there? 


Where do 
hurricanes stride? 


The east winds often bring rain. The south 
winds bring the warmth in the spring. The 
north winds bring cold and snow, but the west 
winds are often pleasant and bring fair weather 
and cloudless sky. 

There are dozens of different kinds of winds. 
They have many names. Breeze, gale, hurri¬ 
cane, cyclone, tornado, are all names of various 
winds. A light breeze goes only two or three 
miles an hour; a strong breeze may go ten miles 
an hour. A strong wind will go as high as 
twenty miles an hour. When the wind blows 
thirty or forty miles an hour we call it a gale. 

Hurricanes go seventy-five miles an hour, as 
fast as a very fast automobile. When an auto¬ 
mobile going that fast strikes something there 
is a terrible accident. When wind going that 
fast strikes trees and houses it tears them up and 
carries them away and makes terrible destruc¬ 
tion everywhere. 

Hurricanes come only in warm spots of the 
country. There have been very bad ones in 
Cuba and in Florida, and in the Philippine 


THE WIND 


67 


Islands. They are just very strong winds blow¬ 
ing straight from the sea onto the land. They 
are caused by the water getting hot, so that 
the air over it rises very quickly and the cold 
wind over the sea rushes in to fill the empty 
space left by the rising air. 

A great many times a high wave in the sea is 
blown along with the wind, and the water 
comes up over the land and causes as much 
damage as the wind does. About eighty years 
ago a hurricane and a wave blew over the Gulf 
of Mexico and buried under water several 
islands. On one of the islands was a big hotel 
full of people. They were all drowned and 
their bodies were found along the coast, some¬ 
times a hundred miles away from the island. 

North America is in the region of the western 
winds. The wind blows most of the time from 
the west or southwest. A great many things 
interfere, so that there are days when the wind 
comes from the north or the south or the east, 
but when the winds for a whole year are 
counted, it will be found that the winds have 



A tropical hurricane 


What wind 
blows most in 
North America? 


68 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


come from the west or southwest for about six 
months out of the year. 

In different countries they have names for 
some of their winds. In India there is a wind 
that blows from the south in summer and from 
the north in winter. In the winter the winds 
have come from the north where there are 
deserts, so that they do not bring any rain to 
India. The summer winds from the south have 
blown over warm oceans and they are full of 
moisture which falls on the land making it 
fertile. Thus they have two seasons in India, a 
rainy and a dry season; the wet time is in sum¬ 
mer and the dry season in winter. They call 
this wind the monsoon, which is the Arabian 
word meaning season. 

If the winds that blow from the south do not 
lose all of their water before they reach the high 
Himalaya Mountains that are the northern 
boundary of India, they lose it then. These 
mountains are so high that there is always snow 
on their tops. The winds have to go up five 
miles to go over them. As they go up they get 


THE WIND 69 

cold and the water turns to rain and falls. The 
south slope of the mountains is the wettest place 
in the world. Sometimes forty-two feet of 
water falls there every year. 

The sailors in the Pacific Ocean are very 
much afraid of a wind that they call a typhoon. 
The name comes from a Chinese word “tai- 
fung,” meaning storm. These always blow 
from the east. They are strong winds that 
whirl around very fast, as fast as a hurricane. 
Any ship that is in the path of a typhoon might 
be wrecked. Sometimes they blow over small 
islands that are in the path of the storm and do 
enormous damage. 

In Italy and Greece there is a wind that the 
people call the sirocco. It blows from the south 
and is very hot, so hot that often it burns up the 
plants and the leaves on the trees. It often has 
sand and dust from the deserts in northern 
Africa in it. It blows all night and all day for 
weeks at a time and makes the countries hot and 
dry and unpleasant. 

In the great deserts of Africa and Arabia a 


What winds 
do other 
countries have? 


THE WORLD'S MOODS 


hot dry wind sometimes blows which they call 
the simoon. It blows so fiercely that it takes up 
douds of dust and sand along with it. When 
a caravan crossing the desert gets caught in a 
simoon they can hardly breathe because of the 
Sand in the wind. The men have to get off the 
camels and cover themselves with blankets to 
try to keep the sand out. Sometimes whole 
caravans are covered with sand and suffocated. 

The reason that there is the great desert, the 
Sahara, in northern Africa, is that the winds 
that strike that part of the continent blow over 
great stretches of land before they reach there. 
They have lost all their moisture and there is 
none to fall on the desert. Occasionally a cloud 
will come over the desert and rain will fall, but 
it never reaches the ground. The air is so dry 
that it dries up the rain before it reaches the 
earth. People standing on the ground can see 
the rain coming in the sky, but they never feel 
it, for it does not get to them. 

In the Rocky Mountains and in Canada there 
is a hot, dry wind that blows from the south in 



The camels have a thin sf(in they can draw over their 
eyes to shut out the sand 


71 









72 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What ma\es 
cyclones? 


the spring. The Indians called it the chinook, 
meaning snow-melter. It makes the snow dis¬ 
appear in the spring and the people are always 
glad to feel it come. In Germany they call the 
same wind the “schneefresser,” which means 
“snow-eater” in their language. 

Most people get cyclones mixed up with 
tornadoes. They are not the same thing at all. 
Cyclones are great circles of wind sometimes 
one thousand miles across. They are caused by 
the changes in the weight of the air in warm 
and cold places, just like any other winds. They 
go in a great circle. Sometimes part of the circle 
will go faster and cause a hurricane. Sometimes 
a bit of it strikes a cloud and we have a rain¬ 
storm. When the cloud is filled with tiny bits of 
electricity there may be a thunderstorm. But 
the great cyclone keeps on going. The circle 
may go over an ocean, or over the whole of the 
United States. Very often it is nothing but just 
a gentle breeze going about ten miles an hour. 

The wind in the cyclone carries clouds along 
with it. The weather man can tell where the 


THE WIND 


73 


winds go, and so can predict rain will fall in a 
certain place. 

In the center of the great circle, for cyclone 
means air going in a circle, there is always 
strong wind. The wind is less strong at the 
outside edge. 

A tornado is the most terrible storm in the 
world. The only good thing about it is that a 
tornado does not cover much ground. One 
may be so small that it goes for only ten miles 
and has a path about three blocks across. But 
in that little space it will tear up trees, carry 
away cows and horses and automobiles, pull 
houses to pieces, and kill people. The storm 
may be over in ten minutes, but it may do mil¬ 
lions of dollars worth of damage. 

A tornado is a funnel-shaped cloud whirling 
round and round so fast that no one has ever 
been able to measure how fast it goes, and 
traveling forward rather slowly. Inside the 
funnel some men have thought that the cloud 
was going at a speed of four hundred miles an 
hour, faster than any automobile or airplane has 


What is 
a tornado? 


74 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


ever been able to go. It goes so fast that heavy 
objects like cows and automobiles have been 
picked up and carried for miles high up in the 
air. When the cloud stopped whirling the 
things were dropped and killed or destroyed. 

Usually the funnel goes along the ground 
pretty slowly, so that if people see it coming they 
can often get out of the way. Not long ago a 
tornado came up in Kansas. It was seen coming 
several miles away and the brave telephone girl 
of the town that was in its path called up the 
people in the town and warned them to get out 
of the way. They got into automobiles and 
drove outside of the town about a mile. The 
storm came and tore down the houses in the 
little city, but the people a mile away felt noth¬ 
ing but a wind. The funnel was traveling so 
slowly that it did not strike the town for ten 
minutes after it was first seen. 

In Iowa and Arkansas and other western 
states tornadoes are fairly common. The people 
in the districts where they strike often build 
tornado cellars either under the house or near 


THE WIND 


75 


it. When they see a storm coming they go into 
the cellar, because the storm never harms any¬ 
thing that is underground. They take an axe 
along to cut their way out if something should 
be torn down on top of them. 

Tornadoes come only in hot weather and 
always in the day time. They always come after 
it has been very hot and still. Men in the 
states where they are common can tell when 
they are apt to happen. The heat makes the 
air rise very fast, leaving a place where there is 
very little air at all. For some reason the cold 
air does not come in to fill the empty place as 
fast as it should. Then, when the wind does 
start to pour in, it comes from both sides very 
fast. When the two winds meet they whirl 
around in a funnel-shaped cloud. The cloud 
gathers up so much dust and dirt that it looks 
black. All the air along the ground is sucked 
up into the funnel, until it looks like a great 
black cloud with a pillar reaching to the ground. 
It travels along the ground at about thirty miles 
an hour, so that any automobile could keep 


A tornado is terrible 
and dangerous 



Jb 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


ahead of it, but inside the winds are going at a 
tremendous rate. 

The tornado makes a terrible roaring noise, 
like a great waterfall. Whole trees have been 
torn out of the ground and carried for miles. 
The feathers have been plucked from chickens 
by the force of the wind. Men have been picked 
up and carried up into high trees or for miles 
along the ground and then dropped and killed. 
A tornado never lasts very long, from half an 
hour to an hour. When the cloud of wind gets 
warm it rises and the winds finish blowing up in 
the air so high that they do no damage on the 
ground under them. 

When a tornado happens over the ocean it 
picks up water instead of dust and dirt and the 
sailors call it a waterspout. They do not 
happen very often on the ocean because the 
ocean does not have very hot places. 


Chapter VI 


THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 

L IGHTNING is the same thing as the light 
in an electric lamp. It is electricity. There 
is a very little bit of it in the light bulb, but in 
one flash of lightning there is twenty times as 
much electricity as all the people in the world 
use in a day and a night. Nature wastes a great 
deal of her electricity, because there may be a 
hundred flashes of it in a single storm, and there 
are nearly two thousand thunder storms going 
on all over the world every minute of the day. 

Benjamin Franklin was a famous writer of 
wise sayings. He wrote: 

“Early to bed and early to rise 
Malles a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” 

“A stitch in time saves nine” 

“Two people can keep a secret, if one of 
them is dead ” 


What is 
lightning? 


77 


78 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Franklin flew a \ite 



He was the American statesman sent to 
France during the Revolution, when we were 
trying to get free from England. He was wise 
enough to get the French to send us soldiers 
and ships to help us in our fight with England. 
But Mr. Franklin was interested in other things 
than wise sayings and soldiers to fight England. 
He was interested in finding out why so many 
strange things happened in the world every 
day. He wanted to know if the electricity that 
he made with a cell in his workshop was the 
same thing as the lightning that he saw in the 
sky during a storm. He had an idea that the 
little spark that he could make was the same 
thing as the big spark in the cloud. 

In 1752, fifteen years before he went to 
France to get help for the Colonies, he tried to 
find out about the lightning. He made a kite 
and fastened an iron key to it. When a thunder 
storm came up he went out and flew his kite up 
toward the cloud. People tried to stop him, for 
they thought that he would surely be killed by 
the lightning. 


THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 


79 


He knew that if the lightning was the same 
thing as electricity the key would attract some 
of it. He was right. The key was struck by a 
little flash of lightning and the shock traveled 
down the wet string to his hand. 

When the moisture in the air condenses on a 
tiny grain of dust, in some way the little drop 
becomes charged with electricity. That is, some 
of the electricity that is always in the air, gathers 
on the little drop of water. Then when the air 
gets cold and the drops go together to make rain 
drops some of the electricity cannot stay on the 
drops because there isn’t room for it and it has 
to get off. When millions and millions of drops 
of water are pushing off little bits of electricity 
it all goes together and makes up one big flash 
of lightning. The big flash of lightning is really 
just millions and millions of tiny little ones. 

Flashes of lightning may go from one cloud 
to another or they may go to the ground. When 
they go to the ground they sometimes strike 
trees and split them open. Sometimes they hit 
a house and set it on fire. It may hit a wire 


What ma\es the 
lightning flash? 



Lightning flashes are 
crooked 


8o 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What are 
lightning 
rods for? 


fence and travel along the wire just as electricity 
travels along a wire to a lamp. If cows or horses 
are leaning on the wire in a pasture they may all 
be killed at once. 

The lightning may strike a man and kill 
him. The lightning is very hot, so that when it 
strikes a house the heat may start a fire there. 
If it hits a tree the great heat turns the sap into 
steam so quickly that it must escape and it splits 
the tree open. 

To protect their houses from the lightning 
farmers put tall rods up on the roofs of their 
houses and barns. These rods are connected to 
a wire that runs into the ground at the side of 
the building. People used to think that the rods 
attracted the lightning and it struck the rod 
instead of the roof and the rod carried it through 
the wire down into the ground. This is not 
what happens at all. The rod helps to make the 
lightning strike somewhere else. There is 
electricity in everything. It is in the ground. 
That which is in the ground comes up through 
the rods and goes into the air. The lightning 


THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 81 


does not want to strike in a place where there is 
other electricity coming out, so it goes some¬ 
where else to come down. 

The safest place in a thunderstorm is in the 
house. There are a lot of queer old ideas about 
storms. Open windows do not attract lightning 
as people used to think. Beds are no safer than 
chairs. A closet is no safer than anywhere else 
in the house. Not one person in a million is 
killed by lightning. No one need to be afraid 
of it. Very few houses are ever struck. 

Out of doors the safest place is not under a 
tree, for trees are often struck. Any tall object 
may be hit. In open fields and mountains men 
have saved themselves by lying flat on the 
ground. Although it is the most powerful 
thing in the world, lightning seldom does any 
damage. There is no reason for people to be 
afraid of it. If it could be caught and saved it 
would turn all the machinery in the world and 
no one would ever have to work. 

The lightning does not make any sound. It 
makes the bluish light that everyone sees, like 



Lightning rods 
protect barns 
and houses 


82 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What ma\es the 
thunder growl? 


the light of a million lamps all put together. 
But along with the flash comes a long roll of 
noise, which people call thunder. It is some¬ 
times so far off that it is just a faint mutter; 
other times it is so close overhead that it sounds 
like cannons going off one after the other, so 
loud and close that they shake the house. 

The noise of the thunder is what frightens 
people more than the flash of lightning, al¬ 
though the thunder could not possibly do 
anything any harm. Before people knew 
what made the thunder they often made up 
stories about it. The people of Norway 
many years ago said that one of their gods, 
Thor, had a great hammer which he threw 
across the sky at his enemies. It went so fast 
that it made the flash of lightning. Then it 
returned to Thor’s hand of its own accord. The 
noise of its striking was the thunder. 

There is a story that up in the Catskill Moun¬ 
tains in the state of New York some men roll 
iron balls at ninepins. The rumble of the balls 
is the thunder. A Dutch explorer, Hendrick 



Thor threw his hammer at those he hated and 
made the thunder and lightning 


83 





8 4 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Hudson, sailed up the Hudson River long ago 
looking for a passage to China. They sailed 
down again without finding it. The people 
who live around that part of the country still say 



Henry Hudson and his men play ninepins up in the 
hills when it thunders and lightnings 


that it is Hudson and his men who are playing 
the old Dutch game in the hills that makes the 
noise of the thunder. 

When the lightning goes through the air it 
pushes the air away. After it has gone the air 
rushes in again to fill up the hole. It is the air 
rushing in that sets up great waves like sound 
waves that we hear and call thunder. 

The sound of the thunder does not reach us 


THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 


85 


until some time after the lightning flash because, 
although they are made at the same time, the 
light waves travel thousands of times faster than 
the sound waves. We can tell how far the 
lightning is away by counting the seconds it 
takes the sound of the thunder to reach us. If 
it takes the sound five seconds to reach us the 
lightning was a mile away. If it takes ten sec¬ 
onds the flash was two miles away. Before the 
sound reaches us the lightning has already 
struck somewhere. Lightning always goes in 
crooked zig-zag flashes. 

Sometimes we can see lightning, but hear no 
thunder. The lightning is very far away and 
the waves of sound have become very weak 
before they reached the earth and have been 
caught by the warm air coming up from the 
ground and carried up again. 

Thunderstorms usually come in the afternoon 
or evening, and sometimes at night. A thun¬ 
dercloud can always be told by its heavy grey 
and purple look. Just before it starts to rain a 
cold wind will come. This is cold air driven 


86 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What are the 
northern lights? 


in front of the cloud. Thunderclouds are 
always close to the earth, sometimes not more 
than a mile up. Airmen can fly over them and 
see the sun shining on the top. People high up 
in the mountains can see the storms down along 
the side of the mountain and hear the thunder 
and see the lightning while the sun is shining 
brightly around them. 

Explorers who have gone to the north and 
south poles tell about a lovely sight that they see 
in the nights in March and October. An arch 
of bright colors comes over the pole in the north 
and the south. Red, green, yellow and white 
lights dance and flash and light up all the land 
for hundreds of miles. These lights make it as 
light as day in countries where there is a night 
six months long. 

No one has found out just what makes the 
beautiful colors. It is caused in some way by 
the electricity in the air, but that is all that any¬ 
one knows about it. 

One of the best stories about anything in 
nature that men do not understand is the one 


\ 


THUNDER AND LIGHTNING 87 

that the old Northmen told to explain the 
northern lights, which can be plainly seen from 
Norway on the long winter nights. 

Odin, the king of the gods, lived in a palace 
called Valhalla. He was at war with the terrible 
giants who had lived on the earth before men 
came. In order to get brave warriors for his 
battles he sent his maidens, who were called 
the Valkyries, to the battlefields on the earth. 
They chose the bravest fighters who had been 
killed in war that day and brought them home 
to Valhalla. 

The Valkyries rode great horses and were 
dressed in suits of armour. It was the lights 
flickering off their coats of mail and from their 
shields that made the northern lights. They 
carried the dead soldiers in front of them on 
their horses across the bridge of the rainbow to 
their father’s hall, where he made them live 
again to fight for him. We call the northern 
lights the Aurora Borealis. 

In Norway the weather is often more severe 
than in other countries because it is a land of 


88 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


mountains and is very near the sea. They have 
thunderstorms in the middle of the night and 
sometimes in the winter. Both of these storms 
are very severe, especially the winter thunder¬ 
storms. In America the thunderstorms seldom 
come in the winter, just an occasional one in 
November or February. We do have them 
at night, also, but they come oftener in the hot 
part of the day. If they come in the evening 
they usually clear away and the stars shine again 
before very long. 

Cloudbursts come from the clouds that look 
like ordinary black thunder clouds. Lightning 
plays through them, and then something hap¬ 
pens, no one knows exactly what, and they 
drop all the water they are carrying at once. 
Usually this happens when the cloud floats 
against a mountain. So much water coming 
down all at once sometimes starts a landslide 
on the side of the mountain, causing much 
damage to the villages in its pathway. 


Chapter VII 


BALLOONS AND AIRPLANES 

E VER since people saw that birds could fly 
in the air without falling they have won¬ 
dered if people could not learn how to do it, 
too. In old books there are stories of men who 
have tried to fly. Hermes, the messenger of the 
gods, had wings on his heels and on his helmet 
and could fly through the air. Perseus was 
given winged shoes so that he might fly to the 
country of the terrible Gorgons and bring back 
the head of Medusa. A young man named 
Icarus was shut up in a castle. He gathered the 
feathers from the wings of the birds that flew 
over his prison. He put them together with 
wax and made wings for himself and his father. 
When the wings were finished he fastened them 
on their shoulders and they flew away over the 
sea. His father reached Sicily safely but the 


Why does a 
\ite stay up 
in the air? 


89 


9 o 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



A gay Chinese \ite 


boy wanted to show how well he could fly 
and got too close to the sun and the heat 
melted the wax, so that he fell into the water 
and was drowned. His friends said that the 
gods were angry because he had tried to fly, 
when the gods were the only people who should 
have the right to fly through the air on wings. 

People flew kites for a long time before they 
thought of making machines to fly in. A kite 
is a very light framework of wood covered with 
paper or cloth. It may be shaped like a triangle, 
or a diamond. In China grown people as well 
as children make and fly kites. They have a 
great festival of kites every year. They are very 
lovely there. The kites may be made of silk, 
and may be shaped like dragons or like flowers, 
and are gaily colored. 

Strings are fastened to the corners of the 
framework and a tail is attached to one end. 
The tail helps to keep it straight up in the air. A 
kite can only be flown on a day when there is a 
fairly strong wind. The wind is strong enough 
to push the weight of it up into the air. If the 


BALLOONS AND AIRPLANES 


9i 


owner does not hold onto the string the kite 
would fall to the ground very soon. It takes the 
push of the wind on the paper and the pull of 
the string against the wind to keep the kite up. 

Long ago people found out that there were 
some things that were lighter than air. That 
is, the weight of the air on top of them was not 
as great as the pressure of the air underneath. 
When this was true the feather, or piece of tissue 
paper went up instead of falling to the ground. 

There are some gases that are so light that if 
a bag is filled with them the gas will carry the 
bag up with it and even the weight of a basket 
with a man in it. At first people thought that 
it was wonderful to make a balloon that would 
carry up a man in a basket. When the man 
wanted to come down, he let some of the gas 
out of the bag. When there was not so much 
gas to keep it up, the balloon settled slowly 
down to the ground. 

Now there are great balloons made and filled 
with a new kind of gas that is light enough to 
keep up with a cabin filled with thirty or forty 


Why does 
balloon go 


92 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 



The great German 
Zeppelin 


How does 
an airplane 
stay up? 


people. There are engines attached to the enor¬ 
mous machine that guide it wherever the cap¬ 
tain wants to go. In 1929 one of these great 
machines went all around the world in eleven 
days flying time. They call this kind of a bal¬ 
loon a Zeppelin, after the name of Count Zep¬ 
pelin, a German inventor, who first made them. 
The gas in the Zeppelin is hydrogen. 

An airplane is not like a balloon. A balloon 
stays up in the air because it is lighter than the 
air. An airplane is heavier than the air and 
would fall at once if there was not a way of 
keeping it up. The twisted piece of wood, 
like two canoe paddles fastened together, in the 
front of an airplane is what keeps it up in the 
air. They must be going round and round very 
fast to do it. If they stopped going for a single 
minute the machine would fall. 

This piece of wood is called the propeller of 
the airplane. It is connected to the engines in 
the front of the plane. The engines keep it 
turning very fast, thousands of times a minute. 
As it turns it makes a great wind, which blows 


BALLOONS AND AIRPLANES 


93 


back against the wings of the plane. It is that 
wind that keeps the airplane up in the air and 
drives it forward. It is the same thing that 
keeps the kite in the air except that the airplane 
makes its own wind. 

The airman has only two levers to guide 
the machine with. One of them turns the 
rudder on the back of the ship. This rudder is 
just like the rudder on a boat. This he works 
with his feet. The other one is called the “joy¬ 
stick” and he works it with his hands. This 
tips the edges of the wings and the tail surfaces. 

An airplane flies very much the same way a 
bird does. The bird has to flap his wings in 
order to get the wind under them to keep him 
up, but when he wants to turn he changes the 
position of his tail, which is his rudder, and 
bends his wings just as the pilot in the plane 
bends the wings and tail of his machine. 

The bird finds it hard to fly in very stormy 
weather and he has to watch out for “air 
pockets,” little places in the air where the air 
is moving in another direction. 


How does the 
airman guide 
the plane? 



The propeller is in 
front 





94 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


A pilot always lands into the wind, so that 
when he shuts his engine off and is not making 

RUOOER 



An airplane is steered very much as a bird steers itself 
through the air 


What is 
a glider? 



When was 
the first 
airplane built? 


any wind for himself the real wind will keep 
him up until he gets to the ground. 

A glider is built without an engine. It has 
wings and a tail to help steer it, but the man in 
it depends on the real wind that is blowing or 
the upward air currents on a still day to keep 
him up. He starts from a high place or gets 
someone to pull him along the ground until 
he gets up some speed and then tries to see how 
far he can go before he has to come down to the 
ground. Some men have stayed up for hours 
in a glider. 

The first airplane was built in 1903. On De¬ 
cember 17th, of that year, Orville Wright, who 
lived in Dayton, Ohio, flew a plane for twelve 




BALLOONS AND AIRPLANES 95 

seconds. It was the first time that a machine 
heavier than air had ever flown in the air. People 
laughed at Orville Wright and his brother, 
Wilbur, for thinking that they could fly, but 
they kept on trying, and in 1908 went to Europe 
and gave flights for the people there. 

When the Great War started in 1914 every 
nation in Europe wanted to make airplanes so 
that they could fly over the enemy’s country and 
find out what he was doing, and drop bombs 
on him. More and more airplanes were built 
and many men learned to fly them. 

When the war was over men went on trying 
to make airplanes that would be safer to fly 
in. They tried longer and longer trips in 
them, until two men, Ross Smith and Keith 
Smith, flew from England to Australia and 
Charles Lindbergh flew from America to 
France in thirty-seven hours. 

Now the mail is being carried all over the 
world by airplane. Passengers ride on them— 
not across the ocean as yet—but that may 
happen, too. Freight is being carried on them. 


How does the 
airman \now 
where to go? 


96 THE WORLD’S MOODS 

It seems as if the prophecy that Mr. Tennyson, a 
famous English poet, made fifty years before 
the first airplane was built has come true. 

“For 1 dipped into the future, far as human 
eye could see. 

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the 
wonder that would be; 

Saw the heavens filled with commerce, 
argosies of magic sails, 

Pilot of the purple twilight, dropping down 
with costly bales.” 

The weather is the most important thing that 
an airman has to know about. He can steer his 
ship all right in a fog, but he cannot see where 
to land, and so he may run into a tree or a 
building. Wireless messages are used to help 
guide the pilots. They have all kinds of com¬ 
passes in their ships to help them find the way. 
Much of the time they fly close enough to the 
ground so that they can see where they are 
going and where to land. 

Within the last few years beacons have 
been put up to guide the pilots who travel at 
night. These are high towers like windmills 


BALLOONS AND AIRPLANES 


97 


with a light in the top that goes around in a 
circle. The lighthouses along the ocean are put 
there to warn the sailors away from the danger¬ 
ous rocks, but the light towers for the airmen 
on land are put there to show them where it is 
safe to go and safe to come down. 

All of the tall buildings and electric light 
poles are having lights put on them these days 
to keep the pilots from running into them at 
night. The time may come when there will 
need to be traffic policemen in the sky. 

More and more airplanes are being built 
every day, and more and more boys and girls 
are learning to fly planes. They are not entirely 
safe yet. This is because airplanes are still new 
to us and we have not been able to make them 
as perfect as they should be. Some day inventors 
may find ways to make airplanes as safe as 
automobiles are. 

There are many different kinds of airplanes. 
One kind is made to land on the water. It 
is sometimes called a seaplane. When they 
come down on the water of a lake the spray 


9 8 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


dashes up around the plane, but the machine 
sits on the water as lightly as a bird. 

Some planes have one wing and some have 
two. They have different names, like mono¬ 
plane and biplane. The famous airplane that 
Charles Lindbergh flew on his trip across the 
Atlantic Ocean was called the “Spirit of St. 
Louis,” because the men who gave Colonel 
Lindbergh the money to make his trip were men 
who lived in St. Louis. 

Most of the airplanes have two wheels in 
front with tires like those on automobiles. 
The airman tries to land on the ground so 
that he touches with the two wheels and the 
tail all at once. They are not so likely to tip 
over in landing if they do. They call it a “three- 
point landing” if they strike all of them at once. 




Chapter VIII 


THE WEATHER MAN 

F OR a long time men have known that some 
things got larger when they got hot and 
smaller when they were cool. In 1714, a 
German student named Fahrenheit thought of 
using that fact to measure heat. He put some 
mercury, a heavy liquid that looks like silver, 
but will pour like water, into a glass tube with 
a little bulb on the end. First he put the bulb 
in ice and marked the place where the ice melted 
into water. That he called 32 degrees, or freez¬ 
ing point. Then he put it into water and when 
the water boiled he marked it 212 degrees; and 
he called that boiling point. Then he divided 
the space between into 180 degrees. 

We use this thermometer in the United States 
and England more than any other. Zero is 
thirty-two degrees below freezing point, so that 


How does the 
thermometer 
tell how 
hot it is? 


99 


100 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What does 
the word 
thermometer 
mean? 



A thermometer 
measures heat 


when it is at zero or below, it is very cold. There 
is another thermometer, the centigrade. On it 
the boiling point is at ioo degrees, and the 
freezing point is at zero. It is used in France 
and men who are studying about heat use it 
because it is easier to do problems with. 

The word thermometer means measure of 
heat. That is just what it is for—to measure 
the amount of heat in the air, or in anything 
else. Thermometers are put on the ovens of 
stoves so that the cook can tell just what is the 
right heat to bake her cakes and pies and roasts 
in. Cream must be at just a certain temperature 
to churn into butter quickly and easily. Plants 
need a certain amount of heat to grow in green¬ 
houses. The baby’s milk must be just so warm, 
or the baby may get sick. Little chicks will not 
hatch from the eggs in an incubator unless it is 
kept at a certain temperature. Houses should 
be kept about seventy degrees in the winter¬ 
time so that the people in the house will be well 
and comfortable. 

The weather men keep careful account of the 





THE WEATHER MAN 


IOI 


heat each day. They can tell what sort of 
weather to expect by using the thermometer and 
barometer every day. 

Wind is caused by having one part of the air 
on the earth heated so that it rises into the sky. 
As it rises other air must come to take its place. 
Often the new air that comes in brings clouds 
and rain with it. When air is going up there 
will be very little pressure of the atmosphere. 
The weather man will say that we are having 
a low pressure. When the wind is coming in 
the barometer will be high because not much of 
the air will be rising and the atmosphere will 
be heavy. 

A barometer is a little instrument for telling 
how high or how low is the pressure of the 
air. If it is low the weather man says that it 
is likely to rain. If it is high there will not be 
any clouds brought in and the weather man will 
predict “generally fair” for the next day. 

If the barometer falls very suddenly it means 
that a bad storm, maybe a tornado, is coming. 
The barometer has a column of mercury in a 


A barometer 
measures pressure 



What is a 
barometer? 




102 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What ma\es 
the weather? 



many instruments 


tube about thirty inches high. When it stays 
up this high there is a high pressure; if it falls 
to twenty-eight or twenty-nine it is a low 
pressure, which means rain. 

The sun makes all the weather. If it were 
not for the sun we would have no heat and 
cold, nor any winds or rains. But other things 
help to make weather, too. The mountains and 
the lakes and the oceans change the directions 
of the winds; the earth turning around pulls 
some of the winds out of their course. There 
are great currents in the water of the ocean that 
warm or cool the winds and make the weather 
different than it would be otherwise. 

England is an island washed all around with 
the ocean. It is directly across from Labrador, 
where it is very cold. It would seem that 
England should be very cold also, but it is not. 
It is seldom cold enough in England to freeze 
ice thick enough to skate on. They almost 
never have snow there, and the grass stays green 
all the year around. 

The reason for this is that a great warm ocean 







THE WEATHER MAN 


103 


current comes from down near South America 
across the Atlantic Ocean, and washes the shores 
of England. This warm current makes all the 
winds that blow across it warm also. All the 
winds that blow across England have blown 
across this warm water first, so that they help 
to warm the island. 

The mountains have much to do with the 
weather. They cool the winds from the sea, so 
that all the rain in their clouds falls on one side 
of them. One side of a mountain range may 
have a great deal too much rain, while the other 
side is a desert. Sometimes the winds do not go 
over the mountains, but are turned aside. 

Men have studied the weather for so long that 
they can almost tell by watching the ther¬ 
mometer and the barometer and the direction 
of the winds just what the weather is going to 
be the next day. 

There are a lot of old beliefs about the 
weather. Some of them are silly. For example, 
the old saying that potatoes should be planted 
the Friday before Easter is not true. The Friday 


104 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


before Easter may be a bitterly cold and snowy 
day. Many farmers used to believe that corn 
should be planted in the dark of the moon, but 
now they know that the time to plant corn is 
when the ground is ready and the weather is 
warm. People do not think any more that the 
moon has very much effect on the weather. 
There is an old saying that when the horns of 
the new moon tip up so that a pail could be 
hung on them, the month would be dry, and 
if the horns of the new moon were tipped down 
the moon would not hold water and so the 
month would be wet. 

Some of the old weather ideas have been 
shown to be true. When men said, 

"Rainbow in the morning, sailors ta\e warning, 
Rainbow at night, sailors' delight” 

they meant that if it rained early in the morn¬ 
ing, it would probably keep it up all day, 
but if it rained at night it would clear up during 
the night and the next day would be fair. 

Rings of light around the sun and the moon 
are very likely to come before stormy weather, 


THE WEATHER MAN 


i° 5 


because they are formed by clouds. The Indians 
used to say that if the fur on the foxes was thick 
it meant a long hard winter. Farmers some¬ 
times say that if the husks of corn are thick it 
means a long winter. Many people believe that 
if the groundhog sees his shadow on the second 
of February, there will be six weeks more of 
cold weather, and if he does not see his shadow 
then that spring will come at once. There is a 
belief that if it rains on Easter, it will rain for 
the next six Sundays. 

Every day in the newspapers there is a 
weather report. It tells when the sun will rise 
and set, when the moon will rise and set, what 
the temperature and the pressure has been for 
the last day, and it foretells what the weather is 
going to be like for the next day. This news is 
very useful to many people. The fruit growers 
can tell when to protect their trees. The farmers 
can tell when to begin planting in the spring. 
Aviators can tell what kind of weather they 
must prepare for when they start off on a 
flight. Sailors can stay in port if the weather is 



Rings around the 
sun 


How does the 
weather man 
tell about 
the weather? 



THE WORLD’S MOODS 


Who is the 
weather man? 


106 

going to be very bad. People going to work can 
tell whether to take their heavy coats or um¬ 
brellas. People going on an auto trip or a picnic 
will not go if the weather man says that it is 
going to be cold or rainy weather. Sometimes 
the report is wrong, but more often it is right, 
and is of great importance. 

The government of the United States has a 
Weather Bureau in Washington and about two 
hundred weather stations all over the country 
in all the biggest cities. The men in charge 
of the stations have studied about the air and the 
weather. The station has all sorts of machinery 
to help the weather man. There are machines 
to tell the direction and the force of the wind, to 
measure the amount of rainfall and snowfall, to 
measure the heat of the sun, and to tell the 
weight of the air. Twice a day the weather 
man takes all these measurements and puts 
them down on a weather map. 

He sends these measurements to Washington 
every day and gets back from Washington news 
from all the other parts of the United States 


THE WEATHER MAN 


107 

about the weather. If there is a bad storm from 
the west coming toward the east he will know 
it and warn the people in his part of the country. 
Because he has studied the weather for so many 
years he knows just what kind of weather will 
come after a day of east wind, or what weather 
to expect when there has been a heavy thunder 
shower followed by cold weather. 

The weather may be a friend to man in a 
great many ways, but it is often harmful to 
him. When men first lived in forests, prob¬ 
ably up in trees, the weather was warm and 
they did not need to be sheltered from it, but as 
it grew colder they had to come down from the 
trees and go into caves to keep warm. 

So men won their first victory over the 
weather when they learned to live in places 
that would keep out the cold and the rain and 
wind. But it kept growing colder. Some of 
the men went further south and found warmer 
weather, but many of them stayed and tried 
to live where it was cold. Then they learned 
to make themselves clothing out of the skins 


Can we do any¬ 
thing about the 
weather? 


xo8 THE WORLD’S MOODS 

of wild animals. That was another victory in 
the war with the cold. After a time they found 
out how to keep a fire going near the mouth 
of the cave and then they had won the war, 
because as long as there was wood to burn they 
could keep warm no matter how cold it got. 

The animals have to fight the weather, too. 
They grow thicker skins and longer fur to 
protect them from the cold. Some of them go 
south during the winter. A great many of the 
birds do that. Some of them sleep all winter 
as the bears do. The snakes and frogs and 
turtles bury themselves in the mud and stay all 
winter. The fish live under the ice in the 
rivers and the lakes. Some animals, like the 
wolves and the foxes, find dens out of the wind 
where they can stay when it is raining hard or 
snowing. 

As soon as men found that fire would make 
light at night as well as give them heat in the 
day time they had another way of fighting the 
weather. They could do things at night with 
a light that before they could do only in the 


THE WEATHER MAN 


109 

day time. They first used the light of the fire. 
Then they made torches to light the great halls 
of their castles. Soon someone found out how 
to make a little oil lamp by floating a piece of 
cloth in a basin of fat. Then someone put the 
cloth in the center of the fat and made a candle. 
After Franklin discovered that electricity could 
be used for lights people began to use it in their 
houses. Now all of our towns are lighted with 
electricity, in the streets and in the houses. 

When men wanted to live in places where 
the weather was cold most of the year they had 
to find some way to grow crops there. They 
found new kinds of grain that would grow 
quickly and get ripe in a short time. They 
raised animals that could live in cold climates 
and so won the battle with the weather again. 

Because men have had to build houses to 
keep out the cold they have learned to build 
beautiful ones. Men called architects try all 
the time to make more comfortable and more 
beautiful homes. Artists try new ways of mak¬ 
ing the homes lovely inside so that people will 


IIO 


THE WORLD’S MOODS 


What good is 
the weather? 


like to stay in them on the days that the weather 
is too bad to be out of doors. 

Other men have tried to find ways to amuse 
people in the times that it is too cold to be out¬ 
side. They have invented motion pictures, and 
music for men to see and hear, and have writ¬ 
ten books for them to read. 

Parts of America have become what are 
called summer resorts and winter resorts. People 
go to California and Florida in the winter to get 
away from the cold in the north. They go to 
Canada and to the lakes and ocean to get away 
from the heat in summer. All over the coun¬ 
try are railroads to help them go to these places 
and back again. Sometimes heavy rains wash 
out parts of these tracks in the summer or heavy 
snows block them in the winter. Men have 
learned how to protect them from washouts 
and have invented great plows to clear them of 
snow in the winter. 

The weather is one of the most important 
things in the world. It brings rain to give us 
water to drink and to make the crops and 


THE WEATHER MAN 


hi 


gardens grow. It brings snow to cover the fields 
so that the roots of the grass will not freeze. It 
bring the warm winds to make the corn get 
ripe. If the weather was the same always people 
would get very tired of it. People are very hard 
to satisfy about the weather. 

Someone has made up a little verse about it. 

As a rule a mans a fool. 

When it's hot, he wants it cool . 

When it's cool, he wants it hot. 

Always wanting what is not. 

































































































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